Studies have shown that informing language learners about the literal underpinning of idioms can help them to remember these expressions. It has also been suggested that prompting learners to guess the meaning of lexical items may be beneficial because it can pique their curiosity and promote cognitive engagement. In the case of idioms, the…

The research purpose is examining the poems in Turkish textbooks for 1st-8th grade in terms of figurative language usage. The data source used in this qualitative study was gathered from the Turkish textbooks for the 1st-8th grade which was published in 2015-2016. The data were collected through document analysis and analysed via content analysis.…

This paper draws on observational studies of three young children in order to demonstrate firstly, their intrinsic motivation to explore systematically through repeated patterns of action or 'schemas'; secondly, how those repeated actions appear and are explored in their emerging language demonstrating their increasing construction of and…

Every speaker of a native language undergoes an interlanguage continuum or the way that the language learners go through from the first to the second language. Interlanguage is an essential theory for teachers to know what goes on in the learning process. It makes the teachers look at the varieties of mistaken linguistic forms with an eye for…

This article reports a study in which good and poor comprehenders (in 2 age groups: 8- and 10-year-olds) read short passages containing phrases that could be interpreted as idiomatic or not, depending on the context. Familiarity was manipulated by including real (English) idioms and novel (translations of Italian) idioms. Reading times for the…

Mother-tongue teachers teach argumentation analysis. To this end, among other things, they use a stylistic meta-language, i.e. the tropes and figures of style, to analyse arguments as well as more aesthetic communication. The best-known trope is the metaphor. In this article it is argued that a more pragmatic view on the related figure metonymy…

The Aymara of the Andes use absolute (cardinal) frames of reference for describing the relative position of ordinary objects. However, rather than encoding them in available absolute lexemes, they do it in lexemes that are intrinsic to the body: "nayra" ("front") and "qhipa" ("back"), denoting east and west,…

Using the academic writing sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus as data and building on previous research, this study strives to identify the most frequently-used multi-word constructions (MWCs) of various types (e.g., idioms, lexical bundles, and phrasal/prepositional verbs) in general…

Collocation is practically very tough to Chinese English learners. The main reason lies in the fact that English and Chinese belong to two distinct language systems. And the deep reason is that learners tend to develop different metaphorical concept in accordance with distinct ways of thinking in Chinese. The paper, taking "absorb…

This quantitative study intends to better understand the impact of the location of the first deleted word upon the estimation of text difficulty yielded by successive cloze tests based on random deletion from a single passage. The variation in sampling of language features across five cloze tests based on the same passage is random and thus not…

In a paired-associate learning (PAL) task, Dutch university students (n = 129) learned 20 English second language (L2) idioms either receptively or productively (i.e., L2-first language [L1] or L1-L2) and were tested in two directions (i.e., recognition or production) immediately after learning and 3 weeks later. Receptive and productive…

This study considers some problems of reference found in figurative language, particularly in metaphor and metonymy. Analysis is based on the notion that the effects communicated by figurative language depend to a large extent on reference to more than one concept, experience, or entity, and that the presence of multiple potential referents…

Spanish language teachers are encouraged to introduce popular sayings, figures of speech, and proverbs into the language curriculum, both as a means of maintaining the usage of the expressions and to bring variety to the language taught. Definitions, characteristics, origins, and general uses of such expressions are outlined. Some of the most…

English idioms are catalogued for German speakers. The guide is designed to be used both as a reference and as a teaching tool. It is divided into sections, each listing and defining common idioms using a number of English verbs, then presenting them in the context of dialogues. Most sections contain idioms for six or seven more common verbs, then…

Examines techniques of sexist role reinforcement in British and Malaysian newspapers. Features in the British press include modification, relexicalization, reductive language, puns, alliteration, and the classification of women as pin-up commodities or annexes of males. The less explicit sexist language in the Malaysian press shows an even greater…